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Due to Congressional rules, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology had to choose new leadership this year. At the time, we opined that almost any choice would be a bad one. The Democrats had been neglecting the committee, leaving three seats unfilled, while the Republicans filled their seats with people who were openly hostile to a number of fields of science such as evolution and climate research. Late last year, the House leadership made its intentions clear, attempting to crowdsource a search for federal research grants that people considered wasteful spending.

Now, Congress is following through on that effort. Earlier this month, the House committee held hearings that featured the National Science Foundation (NSF) director and the chair of the board that oversees the science agency. Again, grants made to social scientists were held up as examples of wasteful spending. The committee's new chair, Lamar Smith (R-TX), used these to suggest that "[w]e might be able to improve the process by which NSF makes its funding decisions."

Rather than targeting only grants in the social sciences, Smith is reportedly preparing a bill that would revise the criteria for all grants funded by the agency. According to ScienceInsider, the bill would require the NSF director to certify that every grant met the following conditions:

The grant must "advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and... secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science"

It must also be "the finest quality, groundbreaking, and answer questions or solve problems that are of utmost importance to society at large"

The grant should not be "duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies"

The last of these is a reasonable requirement, but it already exists. Both the NSF and National Institutes of Health have rules that are intended to block new grants that have previously received funding. Mistakes may sometimes get made—it's hard to keep track of who's being paid to do what across multiple federal agencies—but there's already an effort to limit this.

The other two requirements, however, completely misunderstand both basic research and the role of the National Science Foundation. Basic research is largely about exploring the unknown; by definition, it's almost impossible to tell which areas of research will end up being groundbreaking or have commercial applications. And the NSF is specifically tasked with funding basic research and science education.

It's informative to contrast these rules with a current example of NSF funding. Prior to last year, the NSF had no idea whether the Higgs boson really existed or whether it would behave like the one predicted by the Standard Model. Yet the foundation put millions of dollars into the Large Hadron Collider and the support infrastructure behind it. So far, the Higgs is looking rather mundane, and it may never have commercial applications or implications for society at large. The bill, as structured, would appear to mean the end of funding for that kind of work.

This isn't the only recent example of Congress altering the rules for research, either. Last month, Tom Coburn (R-OK) sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation, in which he listed a series of grants funded by the agency were a waste of taxpayer money. Shortly thereafter, Coburn added an amendment to a funding bill that would block the ability of the NSF to fund political science unless the grant can be certified as "promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." That amendment was passed as part of the budget.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also come under fire from Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the large public communication budget given to the National Cancer Institute, and while they had him on the Hill, House members grilled NIH director Francis Collins about a paper by researcher Stanton Glantz. Glantz studies public health and tobacco regulations, often using documents obtained from cigarette makers during lawsuits. In this paper, he concludes that the political infrastructure that helped organize the Tea Party movement was developed originally to oppose tobacco legislation.

Needless to say, that did not go over well with the members of that organization within Congress.

With the possible exception of the budget allocated to PR and public awareness at the National Cancer Institute, most of these issues come back to an uneasiness about the research itself. People either don't like it or don't understand why peer reviewers rated it so highly, so they assume it is either an error or a waste of money. In this case, their response seems to be to try to intervene in the process of grant approval, something that's normally left to expert peer reviewers.

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A substantial fraction of basic research goes nowhere. We learn some small facts, but the research doesn't provide a big advance. But, it is typically impossible to know what research will provide a big advance. As inefficient as basic science research is, there simply isn't another general method.

Of course the NSF is not perfect, but I challenge all the doubters to compare its approach to funding against virtually any other organization: here is a detailed description of NSF engineering funding processes (http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/06/an-insider’s-perspective-on-national-science-foundation-funding/). My experience in Biology is similar to that described for engineering, although the current funding rate is actually lower: ~4%. And you can only submit two proposals per year. If neither are funded this year, you've got to wait for next year.

I do not encourage my graduate students to have a career like mine. I love science but: you work crazy long hours with lots of stress. You've got to have funding, but funding rates are so low that top rated research is often not funded. Without funding, you cannot attract graduate students, cannot get post-docs, and will need to fire those you may currently have. Without funding, it is almost impossible to do the work you got into science to do. It wasn't always as hard as it is now to get funding, but times have changed and there simply is not enough money for basic research that is already being proposed (much less cutting back). Two of my colleagues have taken positions outside the US (one in Europe, the other in China) because they can get funding much more easily.

In case you are wondering, I am at a top research university, currently have NSF funding and am working with great students that work long hours for crappy pay.

Why are so many southern republicans against advancing science? Apologies in advance to rational southerners and reasonable republicans. After watching the PBS program (that I was made aware of here on ARS) about republicans in the Texas school board and the underhanded ways they try to limit science in classrooms that doesn't agree with their religious views, I'm honestly concerned for the NSF & NIH.

The only way really are going to save Science and see that our Children and Grandchildren have the Opportunity to learn real Text Book Sciences is to make sure that all of you Vote and Vote against the Republican Party.And I am not Sorry for saying that here at all.The way I figure it is if your Party has the Balls to put losers like Paul Broun and others on our National House Science and Technology Committee that fact alone is more than enough for me.But there is even more than just that fact.Your Party is Extremist and you really are Anti-Science.And to Lamar SOPA Smith...................FUCK YOU !The Internet does not ForgetThe Internet does not Forgive

We're $17T in debt, exceeding Bush's spending by >$1T (more than an entire Iraq war) per year, and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing. Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

I think I would realize that public debt is not the same as private debt, and that the debt "problem" should hardly be a priority during a recession with persistently high unemployment. Macroeconomics 101 and all that.

The conventional wisdom regarding how we need austerity etc is complete bullshit.

I wouldn't worry much about this; in practice, people will word their proposals to match the new language and life will go on. I've written many proposals and seen many a rules change, and honestly, while the top-level directives may change, at the bottom level the research generally stays the same and is just re-framed to align with the new wording. For instance, I don't think it would be particularly difficult to justify the attempt to discover and understand the Higgs boson as "ground breaking."

In addition, while I support funding of basic and large-scale research programs which can't be sustained without government funding, I don't think it's unfair for Congress to question the importance of certain areas. For instance, the LHC cost almost $10 billion to build--that kind of money could fund a lot of science in many other areas; tens of thousands of individual grants could have been fully funded. Even other big science projects might be more deserving. For instance, that money also could have been used to jump start ITER, which is much closer to direct application. That money could have launched three more planetary science missions like Curiosity. That money could have gone a long ways towards a manned mission to Mars. All science isn't equally valuable (or likely to be valuable some day), there are almost unlimited good ideas for potential research topics, and there are finite funds. Just because a bunch of physicists think verifying the standard model is exciting doesn't mean that work is more valuable than thousands of smaller scale studies in engineering, sociology, medicine, astronomy, geology, etc... and vice versa. I'm not picking on LHC (which was, of course, an international collaboration anyway), it's just an example, but everyone will advocate for their field and someone needs to stay outside of it all and decide how the people's money will best be allocated in the public's interest. While democratically elected representatives may not be the most well informed, since the people who elected them aren't generally, they still seem like the least worst option in a free society.

What we don't agree with THE GOVERNMENT funding: why we fall in love ($84K); what causes rats, monkeys and humans to clench their jaws ($500K); how to ride a bike; when did dogs become man's best friend; if politics are genetically determined; whether parents choose trendy child names; when is the best time to buy a sold-out ticket to a sporting event.

You all need to get off your high-horses and realize exactly what you are buying in as being "science." I am not sure when social "science" became a science that actual tech people respected but apparently at least the democrats in the room have drank the Kool-aid. Here is a potential area of funding for you then: Which flavor Kool-aid do Democrats like most? I could find that useful.

And what makes you the right person to judge that these research projects are not fit for funding? Just your general dislike of the social sciences?

It is perfectly fine to have Congress set the general science budget. After that, the grown-ups get to decide which projects to fund through an informed, peer-reviewed decision process. That's the only way you can ensure quality control. Any political oversight simply lacks the expertise to deal with this. The fact that some projects look a bit silly out of context is unfortunate, but no reason to break the system.

Easy way to fire them up and to try and get better science funding back is to tell them that this bill is handing the US leadership in science to China and why is Lamar Smith helping China beat the US ;-)

We're $17T in debt, exceeding Bush's spending by >$1T (more than an entire Iraq war) per year, and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing. Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

Are there any well-known examples of NSF-funded basic research with no obvious applications at the time that eventually did lead to commercially viable products? The average voter doesn't care about the Higgs boson, but they might if I could say, "If we hadn't funded basic research into X, which seemed completely worthless at the time, we wouldn't have had Y, which you use everyday"

We're $17T in debt, exceeding Bush's spending by >$1T (more than an entire Iraq war) per year, and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing. Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

We could start with the estimated trillion dollars we're wasting on a plane worse than the ones it's replacing. Or the millions we're spending to build outdated tanks the army doesn't need. "But think of the jobs," cries Congress, eyeing the next election season.

We're $17T in debt, exceeding Bush's spending by >$1T (more than an entire Iraq war) per year, and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing. Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

We could start with the estimated trillion dollars we're wasting on a plane worse than the ones it's replacing. Or the millions we're spending to build outdated tanks the army doesn't need. "But think of the jobs," cries Congress, eyeing the next election season.

The fear of Congress to trim the military-industrial complex is disgusting. We could probably cut military spending in half and still have the best military in the world.

We're $17T in debt, exceeding Bush's spending by >$1T (more than an entire Iraq war) per year, and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing. Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

We could start with the estimated trillion dollars we're wasting on a plane worse than the ones it's replacing. Or the millions we're spending to build outdated tanks the army doesn't need. "But think of the jobs," cries Congress, eyeing the next election season.

We're spending money to rehab M1A1's coming back from Iraq, the alternative was to shut down the last operating tank factory in the country. Oh, you have a new main battle tank you want to build in two years, well how are the families of the workers going to be fed for the two years between you shutting down the current line and the new production starting up? If you shut the line down and don't do the rehab work all those decades of institutional knowledge are going to walk out the door to do something else and your next main battle tank is going to end up decades behind and massively over budget because nobody who knows how to build the damn things will be working on it. In the long run it'll cost you more than keeping the line open doing productive work for the next two years. It's the same problem that NASA had with the F1 engines, they couldn't build them again even with full blueprints because there's a lot of knowhow that never makes it onto paper and losing that ends up costing you more in the long run.

By those rules the NSF should be renamed the NEF - The National Engineering Foundation.

I'm an engineer but I get the point of pure science. Heck, I take advantage of tons of it every day. It just so happens that most of the pure science I use was studied in the 1800's.

Republicans like weapons systems, right - jet planes and all that? Well, without basic scientific research into thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and thermal systems by Watt, Joule, et. al. we certainly wouldn't have the F-15.

Seeing as how the Federal government isn't responsible for funding research (outside of the defense department) in the first place, this is a non-issue. And of course the government is bleeding money and we should in general be cutting spending everywhere to begin with. The fact this is motivated by GOP's suspicion toward science is of course disappointing, but it probably shouldn't have been there to start with.

Huh? The Federal government isn't responsible for funding research? So the NSF is all just a fever dream. I see.

That's just total outlays, though, so if you want to discuss anual deficit then we're talking about a reduction of ~$350b, looking at 2012 over 2009. (Just to clarify: The 2009 budget, which had the highest deficit of Obama's first term, was signed into law by President Bush. You can say 'Oh, blame Bush' all you want to, but them's the facts.)

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and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing.

Actually, the debt increase is slowing.

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Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

That does not mean we should make disastrous policy decisions.

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Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

We're not all policy wonks here, but how about we cut $460m straight away? We can just add it to the pile..

I disagree strongly that even the third criterion is reasonable. Certainly any proposal that has been rejected once should not be resubmitted without significant revisions, however follow up studies and reproducibility are crucial to the scientific method. That criterion indicates complete ignorance of the nature of science.

As to judging the direct usefulness of research, the best reference is Sir Timothy Gowers' Clay Institute Millennium lecture titled "The Importance of Mathematics." It is precisely about the false utility in trying to distinguish "applied" research.

We're $17T in debt, exceeding Bush's spending by >$1T (more than an entire Iraq war) per year, and we'll blow through $20T by the end of Obama's second term without even slowing. Whatever we do with taxes, we've still got to SERIOUSLY cut spending, and some of that is going to hurt. Hurt bad.

Where would YOU cut one and a half TRILLION dollars from the budget? And that's just to break even...

I think I would realize that public debt is not the same as private debt, and that the debt "problem" should hardly be a priority during a recession with persistently high unemployment. Macroeconomics 101 and all that.

The conventional wisdom regarding how we need austerity etc is complete bullshit.

As is now being recognised by even the morons who advocated it in the first place...

Are there any well-known examples of NSF-funded basic research with no obvious applications at the time that eventually did lead to commercially viable products? The average voter doesn't care about the Higgs boson, but they might if I could say, "If we hadn't funded basic research into X, which seemed completely worthless at the time, we wouldn't have had Y, which you use everyday"

Maybe (probably) it's a silly question, but how was science funded before government grants? I am of the persuasion that government is far too big—why should it be funding limited-application research at my expense—but on the other hand, what are the alternatives?

As many of the commenters here point out, much research with little or no initial application, the kind that you'd think private enterprise would ignore, has gone on to become not just useful and profitable, but essentially to become the bedrock of 21st-century life. That makes me wonder what a non-government-funded scientific community, anti-Congress FUD aside, would look like.

This is one of the myriad reasons I can't vote Republican anymore. The party, as it stands now, has become so anti-intellectual and anti-science, it's amazing they don't scream "You've stolen my soul!" when someone photographs them.

And quite frankly, much of this is driven by religion. Look at the Republican support for creationism and vilification of evolution. People 100 years from now will look at the GOP rejecting evolution the way we look at people who rejected the heliocentric solar system model.

If you're an American and actually care about science, please, please stop voting Republican. You don't have to vote Democratic, but every time you vote GOP, you essentially say "I'm cool with letting these guys shit all over science."

The feds are pissing money away in all directions, and this here guy is attempting to stifle science research under the guise of curbing wasteful spending; never mind that the science grants are a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the budget. He's got a real motive somewhere. But it isn't saving money. He's keeping his real motives hidden.

This review process will likely just cost extra money in hidden expenses, anyway.

That's the GoP's motive since the 80s. De-fund everything they don't like, and add money to the stuff they do. They haven't been the "small government" party for decades; sure, that's what they say, but they keep expanding governmental powers and spending.

Why are so many southern republicans against advancing science? Apologies in advance to rational southerners and reasonable republicans. After watching the PBS program (that I was made aware of here on ARS) about republicans in the Texas school board and the underhanded ways they try to limit science in classrooms that doesn't agree with their religious views, I'm honestly concerned for the NSF & NIH.

It's more an Urban vs. Rural thing. Historically, that meant the south, but now it applies more to "flyover country" and some of the poorer regions (ie. Appalachia).

Republican politicians do this to get re-elected. The citizens they're trying to appeal to are typically either A) business-oriented Wall Street folks, or B) rural folks who haven't been exposed to much of anything outside their local society. For the latter, challenging their religious beliefs is seen as "outsiders" trying to tell them what to believe.

Maybe (probably) it's a silly question, but how was science funded before government grants? I am of the persuasion that government is far too big—why should it be funding limited-application research at my expense—but on the other hand, what are the alternatives?

As many of the commenters here point out, much research with little or no initial application, the kind that you'd think private enterprise would ignore, has gone on to become not just useful and profitable, but essentially to become the bedrock of 21st-century life. That makes me wonder what a non-government-funded scientific community, anti-Congress FUD aside, would look like.

There was never such a time. Science has always been at the pleasure of the monarch in the royal court or at the personal expense of wealthy gentlemen. Even examples like Bell Labs were mostly funded with federal money. The NSF is the new King of Prussia and Elon Musk is the new gentleman philosopher.

Actually the NSF is remarkable for being open to all comers and based on scientific rigor not courtly drama (so far).

Did I ever indicate otherwise? I think NSF grants are close to the last thing we should be cutting, for every dollar in basic science funding we invest $50 is returned to the economy. It's just that a lot of 'waste' in the defense department pushed by certain segments of the left are likewise false economies. There are plenty of places in the defense department we can save money (dropping the vtol requirement for the F35 would be a good start) We're going to need to do some adjustments to social security to ensure it's viable in the long run, and we need some much more serious healthcare reform (MORE of the current broken system isn't going to fix the budget problems, we need universal healthcare with a single payer to do that). It's going to take some serious statemenship to reach the compromises needed to do all this but the kind of politicians like mentioned in the article are going to make that an all but impossible task.

If, for instance, the standard models predict X, and you verify experimentally that the standard prediction is true, you throw the results in the garbage because they're not interesting.

So the next guy has to come along and run the exact same experiments. Call that "commodity science," in the commercial world commodities may not be worth a lot, but you don't just throw them away.

Da fuq? Experiments confirming the predictions of theory are thrown out? What bizzaro universe are you talking about?

99% of all papers coming out of the LHC are of the "results conform perfectly to Standard Model prediction" variety, and the 1% remain are behaviors where free parameters existed (e.g. Higgs mass, B-meson decay path frequency) that were then measured and once plugged in, still conform to the Standard Model.

There's been an awful lot of particle physics papers in the last 30 year for all 0 of them that have not been verifications of the Standard Model predictions (frankly at this point particle physicists are gagging for something that isn't consistent with the SM to show up in their experiments).

Which only make sense because in science confirming the predictions of theory with experiment is vital. It's pretty much the whole bag, what makes science science. A novel experiment that confirms -- even if for the Nth time -- that theory is correct is quite valuable. It might not be worth a Nobel Prize, but it's easily worth a nice journal article or a PhD.

Or if you're confirming, say, the existing of the W & Z bosons (or surely in the near future the Higgs) then it can be worth a Nobel. Even though the result is "not interesting". Quotes here indicating utter wrongness.

Wow... a lot of Darwin fans on this site. So, it's now called the scientific law of evolution? Or is it still the theory of evolution - perhaps I missed some Nobel prize proving the theory? A lot tof intolerant people here are going to disagree with me... but alas... from chaos comes order, right?

Must... not... feed... I'm too weak.

Gadzooks! You oughtta be told that in Science, a Theory trumps a Law like a Straight Flush beats a Pair.

The feds are pissing money away in all directions, and this here guy is attempting to stifle science research under the guise of curbing wasteful spending; never mind that the science grants are a fraction of a fraction of one percent of the budget. He's got a real motive somewhere. But it isn't saving money. He's keeping his real motives hidden.

The nu-Republicans have never seen for-the-public-good government spending they don't want to cut. Or military projects they didn't want to fund.

We all know this cannot be directly measured, but just hand waving and acting frumpy because someone has the gall to ask the question is not a valid response. It requires a serious answer.

The politicians may be pretty poor at interpreting what is worth it, but someone should be able to explain how the current methods are working, and why they don't need changed.

Being able to point to some high profile wins would be nice. And these are....? I'm not claiming they don't exist, I'm only saying this question will stump the average citizen.

Read the list at any conference of the accepted papers, and ask yourself if 50% of these were never done, would anybody notice? And yes, the soft sciences are easy targets. And that is valid. We aren't running a science welfare system.

Look, I support R & D, but asking for accountability is not to be scoffed at, and the impression of ivory tower arrogance comes across pretty clearly from those who benefit most from it. It's not endearing, at all. We pay the bills.

The problem with selecting a conference and checking the papers is you need to be an expert in the conference field. Even then, its hard to determine what papers will be cited in 5 to 10 years time. Maybe they have a good result hidden in the middle of a proof which becomes crucial to the next big thing.

Science used to be funded by the aristocracy, who were the only people who had enough money and free time to dally around with chemicals and sparks. That model isn't sustainable in an era where much research needs high performance computing, and expensive lab equipment. No-one else bar governments will fund the research at CERN, but given the rewards we've already got from quantum mechanics (including every method people could possibly use to read this post) it would be foolish not to allow them more funding. Nobody predicted the existence of ICs when quantum theory was being developed, finding a better explanation of the world was sufficient.